Vindication of Government Policies

[Source: Park's Policies and Speeches (1916), Alvin Wee and Lee Xin Rui of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software and produced the HTML version of this document. Added by Marjie Bloy Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, National University of Singapore

This speech was delivered on March 18, 1820, at a public dinner at Liverpool
in honor of Canning's re-election. It is noteworthy, as has been mentioned,
for its defense of the government's representative polices — policies which
were the aftermath of the disturbances, the unrest, the agitation, and the
violence following the hoped-for but unatained "peace without parallel."
It may be found conveniently in Robert Walsh's Select Speeches of the right
Honourable George Canning (Philadelphia,
1844).

Short as the interval is since I last met you in this place on a similar occasion,
the events which have filled up that interval have not been unimportant. The
great moral disease which we then talked of as gaining ground on the community
has, since that period, arrived at its most extravagant height; and, since that
period, also, remedies have been applied to it, if not of permanent cure, at
least of temporary mitigation.

Gentlemen, with respect to those remedies — I mean with respect to the
transactions of the last short session of Parliament previous to the dissolution
— I feel that it is my duty, as your representative, to render to you
some account of the part which I took in that assembly to which you sent me;
I feel it my duty also, as a member of the Government by which those measures
were advised. Upon occasions of such trying exigency as those which we have
lately experienced, I hold it to be of the very essence of our free and popular
Constitution, that an unreserved interchange of sentiment should take place
between the representative and his constituents; and if it accidentally happens,
that he who addresses you as your representative, stands also in the situation
of a responsible adviser of the Crown, I recognize in that more rare occurrence
a not less striking or less valuable peculiarity of that Constitution under
which we have the happiness to live, — by which a Minister of the Crown
is brought into contact with the great body of the community; and the service
of the King is shown to be a part of the service of the people.

Gentlemen, it has been one advantage of the transactions of the last session
of Parliament, that while they were addressed to meet the evils which had grown
out of charges heaped upon the House of Commons, they have also, in a great
measure, falsified the charges themselves.

I would appeal to the recollection of every man who now hears me, — of any,
the most careless estimator of public sentiment, or the most indifferent spectator
of public events, whether any country, in any two epochs, however distant, of
its history, ever presented such a [21/22] contrast with
itself as this country in November, 1819, and this country in February,
1820? Do I exaggerate when I say, that there was not a man of property who
did not tremble for his possessions? — that there was not a man of retired
and peaceable habits who did not tremble for the tranquillity and security of
his home? — that there was not a man of orderly and religious principles who
did not fear that those principles were about to be cut from under the feet
of succeeding generations? Was there any man who did not apprehend the Crown
to be in danger? Was there any man, attached to the other branches of the Constitution,
who did not contemplate with anxiety and dismay the rapid, and, apparently,
irresistible diffusion of doctrines hostile to the very existence of Parliament
as at present constituted, and calculated to excite, not hatred and contempt
merely, but open and audacious force, especially against the House of Commons?
— What is, in these respects, the situation of the country now? Is there a
man of property who does not feel the tenure by which he holds his possessions
to have been strengthened? Is there a man of peace who does not feel his domestic
tranquillity to have been secured? Is there a man of moral and religious principles
who does not look forward with better hope to see his children educated in those
principles? — who does not hail, with renewed confidence, the revival and re-establishment
of that moral and religious sense which had been attempted to be obliterated
from the hearts of mankind?

Well, gentlemen, and what has intervened between the two periods? A calling
of that degraded Parliament; a meeting of that scoffed at and derided House
of Commons; a concurrence of those three branches of an imperfect Constitution,
not one of which, if we are to believe the radical reformers, lived in the hearts,
or swayed the feelings, or commanded the respect of the nation; but which, despised
as they were while in a state of separation and inaction, did, by a co-operation
of four short weeks, restore order, confidence, a reverence or the laws, and
a just sense of their own legitimate authority.

Another event, indeed, has intervened, in itself of a most painful nature,
but powerful in aiding and confirming the impressions which the assembling and
proceedings of Parliament were calculated to produce. I mean the loss which
the nation has sustained by the death of a Sovereign (George III died on January
29, 1820, after along period of mental disorder and physical weaknesses), with
whose person all that is venerable in monarchy has been identified in the eyes
of successive generations of his subjects; a Sovereign whose goodness, whose
years, whose sorrows and sufferings, must have softened the hearts of the most
[22/23] ferocious enemies of kingly power; whose active
virtues, and the memory of whose virtues, when it pleased Divine Providence
that they should be active no more, have been the guide and guardian of his
people through many a weary and many a stormy pilgrimage; scarce less a guide,
and quite as much a guardian, in the cloud of his evening darkness, as in the
brightness of his meridian day.

That such a loss, and the recollections and reflections naturally arising from
it, must have had a tendency to revive and refresh the attachment to monarchy,
and to root that attachment deeper in the hearts of the people, might easily
be shown by reasoning; but a feeling, truer than all reasoning, anticipates
the result, and renders the process of argument unnecessary. So far, therefore,
has this great calamity brought with it its own compensation, and conspired
to the restoration of peace throughout the country with the measures adopted
by Parliament.

And, gentlemen, what was the character of those measures? — The best
eulogy of them I take to be this: it may be said of them, as has been said of
some of the most consummate productions of literary art, that, though no man
beforehand had exactly anticipated the scope and the details of them, no man,
when they were laid before him, did not feel that they were precisely such as
he would himself have suggested. So faithfully adapted to the case which they
were framed to meet, so correctly adjusted to the degree and nature of the mischief
they were intended to control, that, while we all feel they have done their
work, I think none will say there has been any thing in them of excess of supererogation.

We were loudly assured by the reformers, that the test, throughout the country,
by which those who were ambitious of seats in the new Parliament would be tried,
was to be — whether they had supported those measures. I have inquired,
with as much diligence as was compatible with my duties here, after the proceedings
of other elections; and, I protest I know no place yet, besides the hustings
of Westminster and Southwark, at which that menaced test has been put to any
candidates. To me, indeed, it was not put as a test, but objected as a charge.
You know how that charge was answered: and the result is to me a majority of
1,300 out of 2,000 voters upon the poll.

But, gentlemen, though this question has not, as was threatened — been
the watchword of popular elections, every other effort has, nevertheless, been
industriously employed to persuade the people, that their liberties have been
essentially abridged by the regulation of popular meetings. Against that one
of the measures passed by Parliament, it is that the attacks of the radical
reformers have been particularly directed. Gentlemen, the first answer to this
averment is, [23/24] that the act leaves untouched all
the constitutional modes of assembly which have been known to the nation since
it became free. We are fond of dating our freedom from the Revolution. I should
be glad to know in what period, since the Revolution (up to a very late period
indeed, which I will specify) — in what period of those reigns growing
out of the Revolution — I mean, of the first reigns of the House of Brunswick
— did it enter into the head of man, that such meetings could be holden,
or that the legislature would tolerate the holding of such meetings, as disgraced
this kingdom for some months previous to the last session of Parliament? When,
therefore, it is asserted, that such meetings were never before suppressed,
the simple answer is — they were never before systematically attempted
to be holden.

I verily believe, the first meeting of the kind that was ever attempted and
tolerated (I know of none anterior to it) was that called by Lord George Gordon,
in St. George's fields, in the year 1780, which led to the demolition of chapels
and dwelling-houses, the breaking of prisons, and the conflagration of London
[the Gordon Riots]. Was England never free till 1780? Did British liberty spring
to light from the ashes of the metropolis? What! was there no freedom in the
reign of George the Second? None in that of George the First? None in the reign
of Queen Anne or of King William? Beyond the
Revolution I will not go. But I have always heard, that British liberty
was established long before the commencement of the late reign; nay, that in
the late reign (according to popular politicians) it rather sunk and retrograded:
and yet never till that reign was such an abuse of popular meetings dreamt of,
much less erected into a right, not to be questioned by magistrates, and not
to be controlled by Parliament.

Do I deny, then, the general right of the people to meet, to petition or to
deliberate upon their grievances? God forbid. But social right is not a simple,
abstract, positive, unqualified term. Rights are, in the same individual, to
be compared with his duties; and rights in one person are to be balanced with
the rights of others. Let us take this right of meeting in its most extended
construction and most absolute sense. The persons who called the
meeting at Manchester tell you, that they had a right to collect together
countless multitudes to discuss the question of parliamentary reform: to collect
them when they would and where they would, without consent of magistrates, or
concurrence of inhabitants, or reference to the comfort or convenience of the
neighbourhood. May not the peaceable, the industrious inhabitant of Manchester
say, on the other hand, "I have a right to quiet in my house; I have a
right to carry on my manufactory, on which not my existence only and that of
my children, but [24/25] that of my workmen and their
numerous families depends. I have right to be protected, not against violence
and plunder only, against fire and sword, but against the terror of these calamities,
and against the risk of these inflictions; against the intimidation or seduction
of my workmen; or against the distraction of that attention and the interruption
of that industry, without which neither they nor I can gain our livelihood.
I call upon the laws to afford me that protection; and, if the laws in this
country cannot afford it, I and my manufacturers must emigrate to some country
where they can." Here is a conflict of rights, between which what is the
decision? Which of the two claims is to give away? Can any reasonable being
doubt? Can any honest man hesitate? Let private justice or public expediency
decide, and can the decision by possibility be other, than that the peaceable
and industrious shall be protected-the turbulent and mischievous put down?

But what similarity is there between tumults such as these, and an orderly
meeting, recognized by the law for all legitimate purposes of discussion or
petition? God forbid, that there should not be modes of assembly by which every
class of this great nation may be brought together to deliberate on any matters
connected with their interest and their freedom. It is, however, an inversion
of the natural order of things, it is a disturbance of the settled course of
society, to represent discussion as every thing, and the ordinary occupations
of life as nothing. To protect the peaceable in their ordinary occupations,
is as much the province of the laws, as to provide opportunities of discussion
for every purpose to which it is necessary and properly applicable. The laws
do both; but it is no part of the contrivance of the laws, that immense multitudes
should wantonly be brought together, month after month, and day after day, in
places where the very bringing together of a multitude is of itself the source
of terror and of danger.

It is no part of the provision of the laws, nor is it in the spirit of them,
that such multitudes should be brought together at the will of unauthorized
and irresponsible individuals, changing the scene of meeting as may suit their
caprice or convenience, and fixing it, where they have neither property, nor
domicil, nor connexion. The spirit of the law goes directly the other way. It
is, if I may so express myself, eminently a spirit of corporation. Counties,
parishes, townships, guilds, professions, trades, and callings, form so many
local arid political subdivisions, into which the people of England are distributed
by the law: and the pervading principle of the whole is that of vicinage or
neighbourhood; by which each man is held to act under the view of his neighbours;
to lend his aid to them, to borrow theirs; to share their councils, their duties,
and their burdens; and to [25/26] bear with them his
share of responsibility for the act of any of the members of the community of
which he forms a part.

Observe, I am not speaking here of the reviled and discredited statute law
only, but of that venerable common law to which our reformers are so fond of
appealing on all occasions, against the statute law by which it is modified,
explained, or enforced. Guided by the spirit of the one, no less than by the
letter of the other, what man is there in this country who cannot point to the
portion of society to which he belongs? If injury is sustained, upon whom is
the injured person expressly entitled to come for redress? Upon the hundred,
or the division in which he has sustained the injury. On what principle? On
the principle, that as the individual is amenable to the division of the community,to
which he specially belongs, so neighbours are answerable for each other. Just
laws, to be sure, and admirable equity, if a stranger is to collect a mob which
is to set half Manchester on fire; and the burnt half is to come upon the other
half for indemnity, while the stranger goes off, unquestioned, to excite the
like tumult and produce the like danger elsewhere!

That such was the nature, such the tendency, nay, that such, in all human probability,
might have been the result, of meetings like that of the 16th of August (the
meeting at Manchester which led to the so-called Peterloo massacre), who can
deny? Who that weighs all the particulars of that day, comparing them with the
rumours and the threats that preceded it, will dispute that such might have
been the result of that very meeting, if that meeting, so very legally assembled,
had not, by the happy decision of the magistrates, been so very illegally dispersed?

It is, therefore, not in consonance, but in contradiction to the spirit of
the law, that such meetings have been holden. The law prescribes a corporate
character. The callers of these meetings have always studiously avoided it.
No summons of freeholders — none of freemen — none of the inhabitants
of particular places or parishes — no acknowledgment of local or political
classification. just so at the beginning of the French Revolution: the first
work of the reformers was to loosen every established political relation, every
legal holding of man to man; to destroy every corporation, to dissolve every
subsisting class of society, and to reduce the nation into individuals, in order,
afterwards, to congregate them into mobs.

Let no person, therefore, run away with the notion, that these things were
done without design. To bring together the inhabitants of a particular division,
or men sharing a common franchise, is to bring together an assembly, of which
the component parts act with some respect and awe of each other. Ancient habits,
which the reformers [26/27] would call prejudices; preconceived
attachments, which they would call corruption; that mutual respect which makes
the eye of a neighbour a security for each man's good conduct, but which the
reformers would stigmatize as a confederacy among the few for dominion over
their fellows-, all these things make men difficult to be moved, on the sudden,
to any extravagant, and violent enterprize. But bring together a multitude of
individuals, having no permanent relation to each other — no common tie,
but what arises from their concurrence as members of that meeting, a tie dissolved
as soon as the meeting is at an end; in such an aggregation of individuals there
is no such mutual respect, no such check upon the proceedings of each man from
the awe of his neighbour's disapprobation; and, if ever a multitudinous assembly
can be wrought up to purposes of mischief, it will be an assembly so composed.

How monstrous is it to confound such meetings with the genuine and recognized
modes of collecting the sense of the English people. Was it by meetings such
as these that the Revolution was brought about, that grand event, to which our
antagonists are so fond of referring? Was it by meetings (meetings at which
there were aspects of rioting) in St. George's-fields? in Spa-fields? in Smithfields?
Was it by untold multitudes collected in a village in the north? No! It was
by the meeting of corporations, in their corporate capacity; — by the
assembly of recognized bodies of the state; by the interchange of opinions among
portions of the community known to each other, and capable of estimating each
other's views and characters. Do we want a more striking mode of remedying grievances
than this? Do we require a more animating example? And did it remain for the
reformers of the present day to strike out the course by which alone Great Britain
could make and keep herself free?

Gentlemen, all power is, or ought to be, accomplished by responsibility. Tyranny
is irresponsible power. This definition is equally true, whether the power be
lodged in one or many; — whether in a despot, exempted by the form of
government from the control of the law; or in a mob, whose numbers put them
beyond the reach of the law. Idle, therefore, and absurd, to talk of freedom
where a mob domineers! Idle, therefore, and absurd, to talk of liberty, when
you hold your property, perhaps your life, not indeed, at the nod of a despot,
but at the will of an inflamed, and infuriated populace! If, therefore, during
the reign of terror at Manchester, or at Spafields, there were persons in this
country who had a right to complain of tyranny, it was they who loved the Constitution,
who loved the monarchy, but who dared not utter their opinions or their wishes
[27/28] until their houses were barricaded, and their
children sent to a place of safety. That was tyranny! and, so far as the mobs
were under control of a leader, that was despotism! It was against that tyranny,
it was against that despotism, that Parliament at length raised its arm.

All power, I say, is vicious that is not accompanied by proportionate responsibility.
Personal responsibility prevents the abuse of individual power: responsibility
of character is the security of men whose existence is permanent and defined.
But strip such bodies of these qualities, you degrade them into multitudes,
and then what security have you against any thing that they may do or resolve,
knowing that, from the moment at which the meeting is at an end there is no
human being responsible for their proceedings? The meeting at Manchester, the
meeting at Birmingham, the meeting at Spa-fields or Smithfields, what pledge
could they give to the nation of the soundness or sincerity of their designs?
The local character of Manchester,
the local character of Birmingham, was not pledged to any of the proceedings
to which their names were appended. A certain number of ambulatory tribunes
of the people, self-elected to that high function, assumed the name and authority
of whatever place they thought proper to select for a place of meeting; their
rostrum was pitched, sometimes here, sometimes there, according to the fancy
of the mob, or the patience of the magistrates; but the proposition and the
proposer were in all places nearly alike; and when, by a sort of political ventriloquism,
the same voice (presumably that of Orator Hunt and his associates) had been
made to issue from half a dozen different comers of the country, it was impudently
assumed to be a concord of sweet sounds, composing the united voice of the people
of England!

Now, gentlemen, let us estimate the mighty mischief that has been done to liberty
by putting down meetings such as I have described. Let us ask, what lawful authority
has been curtailed; let us ask, what respectable community has been defrauded
of its franchise; let us ask, what municipal institutions have been violated
by a law which fixes the migratory complaint to the spot whence it professes
to originate, and desires to hear of the grievance from those by whom that grievance
is felt; — which leaves to Manchester, as Manchester, to Birmingham, as
Birmingham, to London, as London, all the free scope of utterance which they
have at all times enjoyed for making known their wants, their feelings, their
wishes, their remonstrances; — which leaves to each of these divisions
its separate authority — to the union of all or of many of them the aggregate
authority of such a consent and co-operation; but which denies to any itinerant
hawker of grievances the power of stamping their [28/29]
names upon his wares; of pretending, because he may raise an outcry at
Manchester or at Birmingham, that he therefore speaks the sense of the
town which he disquiets and endangers; or, still more preposterously, that because
he has disquieted and endangered half a dozen neighbourhoods in their turn,
he is, therefore, the organ of them all, and, through them, of the whole British
people.

Such are the stupid fallacies which the law of the last session has extinguished
and such are the object and effect of the measures which British liberty is
not to survive.

To remedy the dreadful wound thus inflicted upon British liberty, to restore
to the people what the people have not lost — to give a new impulse to
that spirit of freedom which nothing has been done to embarrass or restrain,
we are invited to alter the constitution of that assembly through which the
people share in the legislature; in short, to make a radical reform in the House
of Commons. (The remaining portion of the speech deals largely with Parliamentary
reform).

References

Park, Joseph Hendershot.
British Prime Ministers of the Nineteenth Century: Policies and Speeches. New York: New York University Press, 1916, pp. 21-29.